London Life

Top tables

“The best table in a restaurant will be comfortable and have a commanding view of the room. If you are a top actor you want people to see you,” says Russell Norman, the owner of the Polpo restaurant group, and a former maitre d’ at some of the smartest restaurants in London, including Scott’s and J Sheekey. “It’s diplomacy in its most basic form. You have to consider the social dynamic: if you have top literary agent A and top literary agent B you place them so they can see each other, but obviously not be overheard. It’s vital to engineer a room. A power table is never accidental,” he says. “At Scott’s there were two power tables - numbers nine and ten as I recall, in the centre of the room.” These are nirvana for those who dine to be seen, but Norman reveals another, more private, table at the restaurant, for those who want to see, but not be seen. “This is a table for four, further back and beneath a mural, it is hidden by the angle of a wall. That is where I used to seat senior members of the Royal Family,” he says.

The more you learn about the hierarchy of seating at London’s top restaurants, the more complex it becomes. Generally, a corner table facing into the room is the ‘best’ table for two people – and a curved booth is usually ‘best’ for four – though a super celebrity will sometimes be given a booth table for four, even if only dining with one other person. And though many of London’s chicest restaurants will refuse to give the numbers of their ‘best tables’ – it is perhaps not by chance that Le Gavroche has no fewer than eight corner tables.

A friend who was accompanying the wife of a former senior politician to the opera, rang The Ivy for a table. “I’m sorry sir, we have nothing at that time for that evening” came the reply – nettled that his own name (and title) had not done the trick, he rang back immediately in the persona of the lady’s assistant, and a table was instantly forthcoming. So, the first rule to getting a table at all, is to have a well-known name, no matter how minor – but the second rule, and one endorsed by Fernando Peire, The Ivy’s starry maitre d’, is to become a ‘regular’. “Don’t spread yourself too thin,” he counsels. “Find a restaurant you like and go there as often as you can.” An earlier Ivy maitre d’ recalls, a charming, but far from starry, film producer, who conducted all his deals over lunch there: “Sometimes he was in five days a week – he could always get his favourite table.”

If some people could not swallow their breakfast at The Wolseley unless they were seated at a ‘best’ table in the central circle, for others their best table is the most discreet. Woody Allen was recently seen by diners at Elystan Street, Philip Howard’s hugely popular Chelsea restaurant, making his way incognito to a secluded ‘best’ table at the back of the room (number 30). “He had his hat pulled so far down over his eyes, it made him a bit conspicuous,” said one diner. On the other hand, Sir Michael Caine, a regular here, has no such qualms, and dines with his family, insouciant, at table 12, near the front.

The tables at the back of the room at J Sheekey are the ones, beloved by the cognoscenti. “The front tables are for tourists,” one regular told me. At The Greenhouse, whose calm, grown-up vibe and peerless cuisine attracts Mayfair locals and well-heeled gastro-tourists “tables near the window are ‘best’,” their maitre d’ reveals, where they overlook the lush greenery of its secret garden – rare in London. At Chiltern Firehouse, table ten, a curved booth near the entrance, with a hole in the table for a fireman’s pole, is the one to ask for, while at Wild Honey, Bond Street art dealers go for table ten – a round table for four in the centre of the action, opposite the bar, while table 14, at the end of the red-leather banquette, is their discreet billet for two. London’s prettiest table is table one at the new Jean-Georges at The Connaught hotel. In a curved niche edged by classical pilasters, you can dine on such demotic dishes as fish and chips or a burger, all given a superb twist by starry chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

Many a maitre d’ will tell you maddeningly “all our tables are best tables,” but before its redesign two years ago by elite restaurant designer Martin Brudnizki, there was an area on the left-hand wall of The Ivy that even the staff called Siberia. “But now I really can say that all the tables at The Ivy are best tables,” he says. Brudnizki has kept the panelling, the paintings and the mystique of the restaurant, but has placed a glittering bar in the centre of the room, installed banquettes and curving leather clad-booths on either side (the new power tables) and instituted the initially controversial, but now hugely popular, secluded areas at the back, under a Maggi Hambling painting. “You have four different types of experience in one, relatively small, restaurant,” Brudnizki says. “We want the customer to have the feeling ‘I’m going to have a great time here’ when you walk into a restaurant we have designed,” he says. “That’s what we are always trying to achieve.”

At Sexy Fish, in Mayfair, Brudnizki has raised some of the curved booths (best tables) and the kitchen too, onto shallow platforms, and though he did it to break up a room that was too large, it certainly conveys a certain status and has made the tables near the kitchen among the most coveted.

Those looking for shortcuts to be seated at the perfect table should consider coming in person in advance to the restaurant – it is harder to refuse a customer standing in front of you, indicating the table he would like. One ploy used by a man who shared a name with a famous theatrical knight was known to ring a restaurant and announce “This is …err John Smith” – to which he often got the reply, “Oh, Sir John, let me see if we have a table” – but this is less likely to work now that most restaurants use online booking websites such as Open Table, which record the preferences and visits of all the regulars. Another way of being remembered in a top restaurant is to book for the less popular “shoulder” times – before 7pm or after 9pm.

Every single restaurant which has a bar where you can dine states that dining at the bar is their “best table” and many, even among the smartest places, will have a few places kept back, to ease the service and for last-minute walk-ins. Bar dining provides the noise, fun and theatre of watching your dish, or your cocktail, being made. More than that, dining at the bar is the perfect place to ease the awkwardness of a first date. Russell Norman’s Spuntino restaurant, which has only bar dining, and no tables, has played cupid for innumerable London couples.

Terrace dining too has freed up extra last-minute seats in London restaurants when the weather is good. And yet two restaurants with huge and lovely outdoor spaces, The River Café (where booking opens three to four months in advance) and The Ivy Chelsea Garden, whose outdoor tables nestle in bosky dells in its huge garden, are still very difficult to get into.

Consider then Hawksmoor Guildhall, where City powerbrokers make deals over chargrilled steak, which has no fewer than four telephone numbers – the published number, the regulars number, the VIP number and the owners’ number. Sometimes it seems it’s just about knowing who to call.